The old Japanese-style building fell apart in the golden-white light.
Tiles, wooden beams, walls, floors, furniture-everything was torn apart by the impact and sent flying everywhere.
Less than two seconds passed between the band of light touching the building and the entire house becoming rubble.
Artoria lowered her sword.
Excalibur's light slowly receded. The blade still shone, the fairy script engraved on its golden surface flickering.
That strike had not released its True Name.
Mana Burst alone, combined with the holy sword's own properties, had produced that destructive power.
Measured by Noble Phantasm rank, that strike already approached the True Name Release of an A+ Anti-Army Noble Phantasm.
And that had only been a casual swing.
Within the ruins of the Matou Family mansion, the dust and smoke had yet to clear completely.
Broken wooden beams and shattered tiles slowly collapsed, occasionally making dull crashing sounds.
Orange-red embers remained where the heat had scorched everything, flickering in the night wind.
The entire building had been split in two from the front. Along the path the light had traveled, the wreckage on either side had fallen outward.
Something still stood at the center of the ruins.
A black object about two meters wide and three meters tall jutted diagonally out of the broken bricks and rubble.
It was a load-bearing wall that had originally stood inside the Matou Family mansion, torn from the building along with its steel reinforcement by some force.
The wall had turned completely black, with bright red, vein-like patterns spreading from its center to its edges.
Knight of Owner.
At the last instant before the torrent of light struck, Berserker had relied on his combat instincts to tear a load-bearing wall from beside him and turn it directly into a Noble Phantasm.
The makeshift E-rank shield-type Noble Phantasm stood in front of him and his Master, barely withstanding the head-on impact of that strike.
Only barely.
The black wall-shield was covered in deep cracks. In several places, the shock waves had punched straight through, leaving fist-sized holes that let light through.
Behind the shield, Berserker knelt on one knee. His black mist was considerably thinner than before, and his left arm hung crookedly to one side, dislocated or already broken.
Those two crimson points of light still shone, but they were dimmer still than they had been at the harbor the previous night.
Two figures huddled behind him.
Kariya Matou covered a small, purple-haired figure with his entire body.
His white hair clung messily to his sweat- and blood-covered face. From exhausting his magical energy, his grayish-blue skin had turned almost the color of a corpse.
Crest Worms writhed frantically beneath his skin, as though squeezing out the last of what he had.
He was still alive.
The small figure in his arms was still alive too.
Sakura Matou.
Long purple hair, hollow purple eyes.
Originally a child of the Tohsaka Family, she had been adopted into the Matou Family, then tortured into this state by Zouken Matou.
Kariya Matou held her tightly in his arms just like that, her face buried in his chest, her body trembling.
Kariya Matou confirmed two things.
First, he was still alive.
Second, Sakura was still alive.
Then anger surged through him like fire.
That strike had nearly killed Sakura.
That light had nearly erased the child he had desperately protected, the only child in this world he still wanted to protect, right before his eyes.
Kariya Matou raised his right hand.
On its back, one of his three Command Spells was glowing.
"Berserker-"
His voice sounded as though it had been squeezed from a machine on the verge of falling apart.
Hoarse and broken, yet every word carried a heavy force.
"Use every means at your disposal! Tear the one who attacked us to pieces!!!"
The Command Spell activated.
Red light burst from the markings on the back of his hand. As the Command Spell unleashed the absolute authority granted by the Holy Grail, it also poured the vast magical energy within it into the Master-Servant contract all at once.
For Berserker, who was nearly out of magical energy, the power supplied by that single Command Spell was like feeding high-purity fuel straight into an engine about to stall.
The black mist surged.
With the infusion of magical energy from the Command Spell, Berserker's Spirit Origin immediately returned to full power.
His dislocated left arm snapped back into place as his Spirit Origin repaired itself, and the black mist gathered into a thick layer once more.
Those crimson points of light went from dim to blindingly bright. His entire humanoid form sprang up from its kneeling position, the force sending broken bricks flying beneath his feet.
Berserker became a black blur, shooting from the ruins toward Artoria, a hundred and twenty meters away.
He was fast.
But Artoria was faster.
Her emerald eyes had already caught the trajectory of the black blur rushing out.
Instinct A had determined his line of attack the moment Berserker rose.
Artoria stepped forward with her left foot. Excalibur traced a golden arc through the air, meeting him head-on.
They collided roughly sixty meters in front of the Matou Family ruins.
From somewhere, Berserker's right hand snatched a steel pipe that had flown out of the rubble. The instant he touched it, it became a Noble Phantasm, and he brought it down toward Artoria's head.
Artoria swept Excalibur diagonally upward, the blade crossing the black steel pipe in midair.
The sound of metal snapping rang out.
Excalibur cut the steel pipe Noble Phantasm straight in half.
The blade barely slowed at all, its momentum carrying it farther upward.
Had Berserker not leaned his upper body backward at the last instant, that slash would have cut from his left shoulder all the way to his right waist.
Even so, the wind from the blade cut a shallow split through the black mist over his chest.
Berserker retreated three steps, opening the distance again.
Artoria gave him no time to adjust. She stepped forward, activating Mana Burst A again.
Artoria now was on an entirely different level from the previous night.
The most obvious change was the nearly visible film of magical energy that constantly enveloped her body.
Under the lights, that film had a pale blue, translucent appearance, spreading evenly over the surface of her armor.
This was not a deliberately deployed defensive spell. There was simply too much magical energy for her Spirit Origin to contain, and its natural overflow had formed a barrier.
The defensive power of this film of magical energy probably already approached a set of B-rank conceptual defenses.
Without releasing a Noble Phantasm's True Name, an ordinary Servant would struggle even to touch Artoria's skin.
And when it came to offense-
Artoria swept her sword sideways with her right hand.
This strike, too, did not release its True Name.
It was only the most ordinary horizontal slash, amplified by Mana Burst.
Yet the instant the golden slashing wave erupted from the blade, it tore a thirty-meter-long trench through the asphalt along its path.
The ground-floor exterior walls of two houses beside the road were sheared clean off, and the blast swept broken bricks and glass more than twenty meters into the air.
Every swing already approached the destructive power of an Anti-Army Noble Phantasm's True Name Release.
She was using Mana Burst as an ordinary attack.
Berserker retreated rapidly under this density of firepower.
His combat instincts still functioned normally. Every dodge skirted the edge of a slashing wave, and every counterattack caught the gap between two swings.
Eternal Arms Mastery A+ allowed him to retain the combat rhythm and judgment of his prime even after losing all reason.
But no amount of skill could bridge the gap in firepower.
The fifth exchange.
Berserker ripped a manhole cover from the road, turned it into a Noble Phantasm, and used it to block Artoria's head-on slash. The cover shattered into three pieces the instant it touched Excalibur.
Before the fragments hit the ground, Artoria's second strike had already arrived.
The sword's tip thrust straight into Berserker's abdomen, and the sound of tearing metal came from within the black mist.
The black knight was pushed back more than ten meters, his feet plowing two deep furrows through the ground.
The eighth exchange.
Berserker swept a steel cable torn from a utility pole sideways like a chain whip, trying to entangle Excalibur.
Artoria did not parry with her sword. She directly blocked the cable's lash with her left forearm, wrapped in its film of magical energy.
The steel cable Noble Phantasm bounced away upon striking the magical barrier, while her right hand thrust Excalibur forward.
The blade cut into the black mist around Berserker's left shoulder, leaving a golden wound.
The twelfth exchange.
Their battlefield had already shifted from the Matou Family ruins to three streets away.
The houses, utility poles, walls, and parked cars along the way had all been caught up in it.
A slashing wave split a two-story wooden house down the middle. It collapsed to either side, raising dust that filled the entire street like fog.
Berserker was now completely on the losing side.
The magical energy supplied by the Command Spell was being consumed rapidly.
Every high-intensity dodge and counterattack ate away at that limited energy.
His black mist began thinning again, and both the explosive power of his movements and his reaction speed visibly declined.
Yet the golden King of Knights facing him had not even lost her steady breathing.
Irisviel's supply of magical energy kept flowing into Artoria, replenishing however much she spent.
For her, this battle had almost no magical energy cost.
She could keep fighting like this indefinitely.
The battlefield was still expanding.
An entire stretch of road on the fourth street was ripped up. Underground water pipes burst, sending jets of water more than three meters high.
A slashing wave cut across a hundred-year-old camphor tree. The upper half of its trunk spun twice in the air before crashing down across the road.
Fortunately, the residents of this area had been evacuated before the battle began.
Before Irisviel and Artoria set out, Kiritsugu Emiya had taken Maiya Hisau with him to do just that.
Using hypnotic suggestion together with bounded-field interference, he had created an abnormal zone within a five-hundred-meter radius of the Matou Family mansion, making ordinary people leave their homes of their own accord that night.
The methods were not exactly gentle, but they were effective.
Without those preparations, given the destruction unfolding before them, over a thousand civilian casualties would have been no exaggeration.
Within the Matou Family ruins, Kariya Matou huddled beneath a slanted concrete slab, holding Sakura.
Shock waves from the battle reached them every few seconds, and the ground kept shaking.
Through the gaps in the rubble, he could see golden light and black mist colliding again and again on the distant street.
After each collision, there was a little less black.
"Uncle Kariya..."
A tiny voice came from his arms, almost drowned out by the roaring outside.
Sakura Matou raised her purple eyes and looked at him.
Those eyes should have looked like those of a little girl of seven or eight, yet there was no fear in them, nor any tears-only a stillness and emptiness that should not have appeared at her age.
"...Are you all right?"
Kariya Matou held her a little tighter.
"It's all right. Your uncle is all right. Sakura is all right too."
His voice trembled.
Not from fear, but because the Crest Worms were gnawing away at the last of his life.
After he lost a Command Spell, the magical energy in his body had emptied all at once. The worms grew even more frenzied, writhing, biting, and squeezing inside him, trying to wring something more from a host who had already been nearly drained dry.
Another tremendous crash came from the distance.
Artoria sent Berserker flying with a single blow. He smashed through the outer wall of a house and crashed inside.
Kariya Matou closed his eyes.
"...I'll protect you, Sakura."